Tilly, listening to the silence broken only by the piercing ring of bird calls echoing back from the cliff, and the soft squelch of their boots on the sodden soil, said, ‘Shame really to disturb it. Places like this – they’re sort of like church, aren’t they? Not something to be trooped through as if it was a sideshow.’ She stopped to watch a pair of kite hawks gyring overhead until the brilliance of the sky dazzled her retinas, forcing her to shut her eyes against the blazing light. The scent of the land came to her then, damp and flowery with base notes of dust and her own sweat. She sniffed deeply. ‘What’s that smell, Luke?’

‘Some of the scrub’ll be flowering. Wattle, maybe, or the myrtle. There’s always something in blossom here. It’s the water does it. Careful now, the rocks get slippery from this point on.’

Here the water had broken through the soil in little runnels trickling endlessly through mossy stone, spreading into shallow pools over which coloured dragonflies hovered. Tiny ferns uncurled in the damp and a hum of myriad insects – everything from water beetles to march flies, as Tilly discovered when she felt the red-hot wire of a bite on her wrist – filled the air. A deep crack several metres up the cliff face disgorged a slow stream of water that fell into a deep rock-fringed pool where young pandanus were clustered amid thigh-deep bladey grass. A mass of vegetation surrounded the whole area: thickets of wattle, and spring bloodwood, wild plum and ti-tree, some overgrown with wild passion vine, their foliage alive with birdcalls and the occasional glimpse of fluttering wings.

Tilly stared about her, entranced. ‘Oh, look at the flowers, they’re so tiny! What are those little red ones, Luke?’

‘Where? Oh, sundews. They’re carnivorous. See the little sticky beads of moisture on them? That’s how they trap insects. The bodies dissolve, and the plant gets the juices.’

‘I see.’ Tilly rubbed her burning wrist. ‘I wish they’d eat a few more march flies then.’

She squatted, laving her wrist, then cupping the hand to lift water to her lips, finding it sweet and cold. A glimmer of movement caught her eye within the depths and she saw an angler fish, just as Luke had said. ‘How did the fish get in here?’

Luke shrugged. ‘Washed in as eggs, or maybe babies. The whole valley would run water in the Wet.’

‘I suppose. No crocs either. I can see it would be an ideal camp site – and very quickly loved to death. That’s an awful lot of water, Luke.’ The pool had to be five metres across and she could see smaller ones dotted about. ‘If it were to open, you’d need kilometres of boardwalk to protect it all. Which way to the paintings?’

‘Follow me.’ He led the way, heading back towards the dry ground.